Torturing Our Sovereignty

by Scott Horton

One issue raised in my Feb. 19 interview [stream]
[download] of
the coincidentally named Scott Horton, director
of the International League of Human Rights,
was that certain crimes, particularly war crimes, are subject to prosecution
by any nation. That is, when the people of a criminal state refuse to hold the
individuals in charge accountable when they violate the most basic laws of warfare,
foreign powers – whether part of the original dispute or not – may assume the
authority to prosecute and punish them.

To top it off, George
W. Bush and his cronies used the excuse of enforcing international law when
invading Iraq:

"The conduct of the Iraqi regime is a threat to the authority of the
United Nations and a threat to peace. Iraq has answered a decade of UN demands
with a decade of defiance. All the world now faces a test, and the United Nations
a difficult and defining moment. Are Security Council resolutions to be honored
and enforced, or cast aside without consequence? Will the United Nations serve
the purpose of its founding, or will it be irrelevant? The United States helped
found the United Nations. We want the United Nations to be effective, and respectful
[sic], and successful. We want the resolutions of the world's most important
multilateral body to be enforced."

Why the American people tolerate all of this torture and hypocrisy is open
to debate, but we seem to love
being on the winning team, and would rather believe unbelievablelies
than take it as our own responsibility to stop criminal actions based on them.

Though seeing Americans one day in foreign courts, deprived of their far
superior (and sorely
missed) Bill
of Rights, would be terrible, we must recognize that the current state of
affairs, where the enforcer of world law claims ineverycase that
those same laws do not apply to itself, cannot continue. The world will not
tolerate being ruled by 6 percent in faraway North America for long. If we keep
this up, and all
indications are that we will, the U.S. may be in danger of attaining official
"rogue state" status itself. With the current administration's record
of pushingall
of our rivalsinto each other's
arms, and its monumental wasting
of our country's wealth, it is not inconceivable that we could soon be in a
situation where we are no longer protected from the rulings of foreign judges.

Scott Horton says there is a lot more torture evidence
waiting to be released.